The Orange Rag - from Legal Technology Insider

Asia-Pacific news round-up

Charles Christian — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:37:45 +0000

Time for another Asia Pacific news round-up – and don't forget that late February we'll be publishing a new PDF newsletter Asia Pacific Legal Technology Insider (to register for your free copy just email news@legaltechnology.com and put APAC Subscribe in the subject line). Advertising enquiries should be sent to our business development manager Philip Woolley at philip.woolley@innovatorsinlaw.com And now on with the news...

• Freehills has awarded Phoenix Business Solutions a contract to support over 1500 users of Autonomy iManage WorkSite. This project forms part of a comprehensive partnership between Freehills and Phoenix, a leading global provider of software solutions and IT & business consultancy for professional service firms. Phoenix have been working extensively with Freehills to advise the leading law firm in emerging technologies such as: mobile, time capture/recording, document assembly and business process automation amongst others. Freehills are currently in the process of working with Phoenix to introduce some of these emerging technologies into the firm.

• Iridium Technology, a consulting firm that is 100% focused on business intelligence (BI) for law firms – is pleased to announce that they have opened an office in the Albany suburb of Auckland, New Zealand. This office will be the center of Iridium's global consulting and client support operations.

“As our client base and staff has expanded, we need to expand our infrastructure,” said Tom Jones, President of Iridium Technology. “The new Auckland office will provide us with a centralized location as we continue to grow our BI consulting staff, as well as a solid infrastructure to support our rapidly expanding client base. The office is also well positioned to support the increasing number of firms in Australia and New Zealand that are looking to Iridium Technology to handle their mission-critical BI implementations.

"Opening the New Zealand office is a logical extension of our goal to provide world-class implementations of BI solutions for law firms in all regions. By consolidating our consulting resources in one facility we will get increased synergy: more great ideas, more powerful and intuitive dashboards, and more SSRS content built on top of the ADERANT ClearView Performance and Practice products."
www.iridium-technology.com

• BigHand has announced South Australian law firm Bartel & Hall has replaced its legacy dictation system with BigHand’s latest v4.2 Voice Productivity technology for iPhone and Android. Kym Bartel, partner at Bartel & Hall, assessed a variety of systems in the firm’s efforts to replace its aging tape system, which it had used since it was founded in 1979. BigHand was the winner following a product comparison and also was recommended by another similar firm in the region.

Said Bartel "Using BigHand is far more efficient than using tapes, with much greater control and accuracy. Work from our three branch offices is sent back to our main office via the Smartphones. No time is wasted physically coming back to the office with tapes. This enables our lawyers to record and capture more chargeable time than they could ever have done with tapes. We opted for Smartphones as a dictation device rather than new digital recorders as the option to work anytime, anywhere, and have dictations delivered immediately to support staff was very attractive to our lawyers, who now say they can’t live without this technology. The win-win is that it is also more cost effective, as the firm is not paying for multiple devices."

Mega APAC New round-up

Charles Christian — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:22:10 +0000

Time for our first Asia Pacific news round-up of 2012 – and don't forget that late February we'll be publishing a new PDF newsletter Asia Pacific Legal Technology Insider (to register for your free copy just email news@legaltechnology.com and put APAC Subscribe in the subject line). We've also included a copy of our editorial deadlines and publishing dates in the attached Excel spreadsheet. (Advertising enquiries should be sent to our business development manager Philip Woolley at philip.woolley@innovatorsinlaw.com ) And now on with the news...

• New South Wales based firm Armstrong Legal has selected Aderant Expert as its next generation practice management system. Armstrong Legal is an expanding firm with five offices across Sydney and Canberra. Peter Magee, partner at Armstrong Legal said “We are very confident in our selection of Expert as our long-term business critical system. Not only does Aderant have the functionality depth that we require, but its stability and reliability post go-live are integral to a law firm’s operations.” Armstrong Legal will implement Aderant Expert in 2012 and take full advantage of the comprehensive business and financial management capabilities to help the firm better manage, grow, and protect its business.

• DocsCorp has announced more wins in Australia and New Zealand for its pdfDocs Solutions Suite (pdfDocs Desktop, compareDocs, OCR Server, OCR Desktop, formFiller and Content Crawler). DocsCorp is also a reseller of the Mimecast unified email management solution in the APAC region. In Sydney, TressCox Lawyers has gone with the Mimecast unified email management cloud solution for archiving. Long-time DocsCorp client and the largest Australian-based international law firm, Minter Ellison has deployed compareDocs across the firm for their document comparison needs. Last month also saw activity in New Zealand with Wellington firm AJ Park going with the Content Crawler and pdfDocs Desktop products; Chapman Tripp, also based in Wellington, choosing pdfDocs Desktop while Auckland-based law firm Tonkin & Taylor went with Mimecast.

• IntApp Inc, a provider of application integration software for the legal industry, just announced that Minter Ellison SA/NT, part of the Minter Ellison group of federated law firms and South Australia’s largest commercial law firm, has selected IntApp Integration Builder to accelerate the roll out of Elite 3E as its new financial and practice management platform.

“Our firm is always on the lookout for advanced, innovative technologies that can maximise operational efficiency, lawyer productivity and client service,” said Michael Veasey, Director of Technology Services, Minter Ellison SA/NT. “We made the decision to use IntApp Integration Builder to accelerate our Elite 3E roll out because we were impressed and excited by the tremendous potential we see for the technology in the hands of a skilled and motivated IT team.”

Integration Builder provides a simple, straightforward way for law firms to connect, manage and automate their business applications and processes. It enables law firms to integrate Elite 3E into their IT environment without having to develop complex, custom code in house. It does this by interfacing directly with Elite’s native web services functionality and providing IT with a graphic interface for configuring business logic and integration rules. To further speed Elite 3E adoption, IntApp offers pre-built templates that jumpstart integration with common law firm applications including document management, records management, time entry, portal and other systems. IntApp also provides firms with access to an extensive community of certified Integration Builder and Elite 3E consultants who can assist organisations with constrained resources.

“Our Elite 3E initiative is just the first of many projects we have in mind for Integration Builder,” added Veasey. “Because it frees us from costly and time-consuming custom software development, we’ll also be using it to automate a number of business processes across the firm, improving the scope of service and quality of data provided to our lawyers and business stakeholders.”

• Epiq Systems Inc, a provider of ediscovery systems for the legal profession, has announced that Anthony Riha has joined the company as senior director, business development for the Asia Pacific region. Prior to joining Epiq Systems, Riha was senior director, private equity services – Pan Asia, at RR Donnelley Roman Financial in Hong Kong. He began his professional career in the role of senior producer/writer for ABC and NBC news affiliates in the United States.

• BigHand has seen the latest version of its voice technology software – version BigHand 4.2 – immediately adopted by law firms following its introduction to the Australian legal market at the recent national road show series entitled The BigLeap.

Pam Grumetza, Senior Business Systems Analyst, Crown Law said “Prior to attending the BigHand Road show, Crown Law Queensland was already in the process of upgrading to Bighand v4.1 with a special interest in mobility and speech recognition. After seeing the demonstration of the latest release we were so impressed with the additional features, especially the formatting functionality using speech recognition, we made a decision to upgrade straight to v4.2.”

Russell Seenan, IT Manager at Barry Nillson noticed the competition moving away from other platforms to BigHand. “The firm needed to find a replacement to its current digital dictation system, which was old and restrictive in the devices that we could use. During our research, we noticed a number firms switching from other platforms to BigHand. We were impressed with BigHand’s latest version, and after speaking to some of their existing clients it became clear that their product, support and professionalism was second-to-none.”

Shine Lawyers has also chosen to upgrade to BigHand 4.2. Jeremy Collins, IT Manager commenting “Shine Lawyers is upgrading to the latest version of BigHand to take advantage of the latest mobile integration, enabling us to leverage our existing smartphone fleet to introduce dictation services via a single mobile device. We are also looking forward to being able to better manage our Word Processing pool through the enhanced reporting modules.”

• Case Study: Sydney Law Firm Spruson & Ferguson embrace innovation with Winscribe BPM
As a result of the success of two initial BPM projects, Sydney law firm Spruson & Ferguson have identified and modelled over 60 processes throughout their business which will benefit from process automation with the help of legal specific business process management solution Winscribe BPM. One of the largest intellectual property firms in Australia, Spruson & Ferguson is leading the way in using business process management technology to improve customer responsiveness and reduce admin overheads throughout their firm; and through their participation in the BPM Advisory Board, for the legal profession in Australia.

Spruson & Ferguson’s IT manager Simon Saunders’ interest in innovation and efficiency was mirrored by Spruson & Ferguson's long standing productivity partner Winscribe, who provide a business process management solution that allows law firms in Australia and across the globe to easily model internal processes leading to the discovery, and subsequently, remedy of inefficiencies within a business. This is achieved through automation of manual tasks; more effective workflow routing; allowing for the consistent application of business rules; increasing the visibility of tasks in a work queue; as well as tracking expected turnaround times in a process. The system is also able to seamlessly integrate with practice management systems or other software packages typically used by law firms, independent of their vendor.

Spruson & Ferguson chose to implement a number of trial projects which tested the ability of Winscribe BPM to effectively pass work tasks and information between different users, workstations and software packages within the firm. These initial projects were completed successfully during 2011 and are now providing the platform for future projects, with over 60 processes modelled and ready for process automation. Saunders adds “Winscribe BPM is fantastic; it’s absolutely met our needs. It was really intuitive to configure and we are already getting runs on the board with some processes, which we have automated fully, and users are pleased.”

The move away from informal business practices, workflows contained within the borders of a single application, as well as paper-based processes required re-thinking by IT staff and senior management. Spruson & Ferguson’s senior in-house programmer Dat AuDuong explained “Initially it took us a while to adjust the way we think about developing a feature. Where we originally would have just written a block of code to achieve a desired outcome, the graphical nature of Winscribe BPM has forced us to look closer at our business processes and examine their individual steps. We now have a much better idea of the processes in our firm and instead of a chunk of code that is hard to maintain and troubleshoot; we now have a graphical process tree with individual bits of functionality clearly defined. If we want to make changes, doing so is very easy and the graphical nature makes it much easier to communicate ideas between our business managers and IT staff.”

Saunders comments “The new workflows developed with Winscribe BPM will result in significantly faster response times at Spruson & Ferguson, efficiency gains in back office operations and a significant reduction in paper waste. By using our practice management system as the heartbeat of our organization and Winscribe BPM as the arteries and veins through which work tasks and information flow to individual stakeholders, we can transition to a simplified and more robust work environment for all. It will, without a doubt, make us more competitive going forward.”

Asia-Pacific news round-up

Charles Christian — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:15:53 +0000

• Aderant v Elite
The competition between Aderant and Elite (part of the Thomson Reuters group) is hotting up in the Australian & New Zealand legal IT markets.

Earlier this week Aderant announced that Clark Toop & Taylor, a specialist compensation law firm with a head office in Melbourne, had selected Aderant to provide its next generation practice and financial management system.

With four offices located across Melbourne and regional Victoria, Clark Toop & Taylor required a system that would accommodate its growing business for the next ten years and beyond. According to Peter Sheppard of Clark Toop & Taylor "In our due diligence prior to going to market, Aderant emerged with the leading reputation in this region for sales transparency, delivery, and product support. These were critical components. There are some unique product initiatives underway at Aderant that we believe will help transform our practice management system into a firm-wide strategic business application, which also was a key driver in our decision."

And then today Elite announced that Bell Gully, one of the oldest and largest law firms based in New Zealand has made the decision to upgrade its legacy practice management platform with Elite 3E.

“We reviewed two good solutions in Aderant Expert and Elite 3E. We wanted a solution where Partners and Solicitors spent the least amount of time in it and got the most value out of it. Elite 3E was favoured in this respect. We were also impressed by Elite 3E’s functionality and flexibility around automating alternate fee arrangements” said Bell Gully CFO Iain Jamieson. “We are excited about providing easier time entry and billing to the front office, as well as better access to performance information”.

“With the addition of Bell Gully to the Elite family, Elite has clearly won the hearts and minds of law firms in the Asia Pacific region by delivering a solution that allows our customers to address the ever-changing needs of increasingly complex legal businesses,” said Kim Massana, president of Elite. “Our team encourage a rigorous comparison of 3E with other solutions as part of any law firm discovery process as doing so highlights the business benefits that 3E can provide. With almost 2500 individual functional requirements, Bell Gully’s discovery process was one of the most thorough we have seen in recent years and we’re excited to have once again been chosen as the preferred solution on the back of such a rigorous investigation.”

Comment: Elite reckon the Bell Gully deal now makes them the market leader in the APAC mid-to-large firms sector.

• Elite (+Pilgrim) v LexisNexis
In case you missed the story, last week Elite bought Pilgrim Systems, a major player in the UK mid-tier law firms case and practice management software sector. What's this got to do with the APAC market? Well buried in the small print is the comment that Elite intends to make Pilgrim's LawSoft system a key offering in the APAC market. “Pilgrim is a strategic fit within our plan to provide a mid-market back-office solution for law firms in the UK and Asia Pacific region – areas where we do not currently have a solution,” said Cary Burch, chief operations officer for Elite. Look out LexisNexis, you've got competition.

APAC New round-up - and a new publication on its way

Charles Christian — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 22:26:04 +0000

Here's our latest round-up of Asia-Pacific news...

• WESTLAW LAUNCHES IN AUSTRALIA
Thomson Reuters has launched Westlaw AU offering extensive content from case law and journals, legislation and commentary to precedents, encyclopaedia and news, as well as legal and tax information. The technology behind the intuitive search capability within Westlaw AU helps point users to precise points of law and offers a new level of confidence that information is authoritative, current and the results are comprehensive. Westlaw AU is developed specifically for Australian customers and is modeled after Thomson Reuters online legal information services in the United Kingdom, United States, Asia, India and South America.

Jackie Rhodes, CEO for Thomson Reuters legal businesses in Australia & New Zealand, said Westlaw AU also features FirstPoint, the first and most comprehensive case digest and case citator service in Australia, as well as the only digest service that allows browsing by subject. Additional features of the service allow for the creation of alerts for new content, and the ability to create and customize folders to organize, store and retrieve information efficiently. "This launch represents a big step for Thomson Reuters by significantly enhancing our leadership position in the legal market in Australia," said Rhodes. "It represents an outstanding example of what can be achieved when we listen to our customers and apply local knowledge and expertise to a globally developed platform."

• HOLMAN WEBB SELECTS BIGHAND DDS
Holman Webb, with offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, has switched from its incumbent digital dictation system to v4 of BigHand's digital dictation workflow application. Since upgrading from their old digital dictation system to BigHand, Holman Webb’s Brisbane office has been able to centralise and control all digital dictation workflows, maximising the productivity of staff across the board. The firm had selected BigHand based on the ease of set-up, administration, the limited IT overhead required to maintain the system on an ongoing basis, and its market leading Mobility Suite. The firm has successfully introduced BigHand for iPhone, resulting in a more mobile workforce and increased productivity on-the-go.

Christine Guy, Practice Manager at Holman Webb’s Brisbane office commented on the benefits of BigHand "As a dynamic law firm, it is integral to our strategy to deliver best of breed service. BigHand provides innovative features that enhance the productivity of our firm. After a very smooth upgrade from the old system, the benefits of BigHand were immediately obvious across the board – advanced workflows now allow legal assistants to work-share, security has been increased as authors can mark dictations as confidential, pop-ups allow legal assistants and lawyers to prioritise workload, and management can address turnaround times, peaks, and bottlenecks through the analytics reporting module. All of which has greatly increased efficiency and control. As a result lawyers are getting transcriptions back ahead of time and documents to clients more quickly.

"Introducing the smartphone solution has also been a huge hit withwith the Partners who greatly appreciate being able to dictate anytime and anywhere on their mobile device. This has enabled them to increase their output and to provide a higher level of client service. Our next plan is to increase the smartphone usage within the firm and to look at integrating BigHand with our FileSite platform."

• CLAYTON UTZ GOES WITH HIGHQ
Clayton Utz has become the latest APAC firm to sign up for HighQ Solutions secure extranet and collaboration portal.

• AUSTRALIA's No #1 & #2 LAW FIRMS GO WITH DOCSCORP
Minter Ellison, one of the largest law firms in the Asia Pacific region, has abandoned its legacy comparison application in favour of pdfDocs compareDocs and pdfDocs OCR Desktop with its “anything-to-anything” document comparison capability.

Commenting on the decision to go with compareDocs, Garry Meikle, Minter Ellison's National Applications Manager, said the firm had undertaken extensive testing and comparison of various products. "In the key areas of stability, accuracy, presentation consistency and handling of Chinese documents, compareDocs was as good as or even better than the others. The clincher for us was the compareDocs UI and the way it integrated with Autonomy iManage and MS Word out of the box. The product was much easier to use, and could be deployed with minimum training and disruption to our users. Feedback from our lawyers and secretaries has been very positive."

The Minter Ellison deal follows last month’s decision by the second largest law firm in Australia, Mallesons Stephen Jaques, to also adopt the pdfDocs compareDocs and OCR Desktop solution as its preferred document comparison solution.

• AND FINALLY, COMING SOON TO A DESKTOP NEAR YOU

Finally, Legal Technology Insider Limited, the publishers of The Orange Rag are pleased to announce that in the New Year, we will be launching a new edition of our Legal Technology Insider newsletter for the Asia-Pacific market, including Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia as well as the emerging Chinese and Indian legal markets.

Called Asia Pacific Legal Technology Insider, the newsletter will launch in February as a PDF digital zine and will be available free of charge to anyone registering at apac@legaltechnology.com (we are are starting to compile the distribution list now). The zine will also be published via this blog and promoted on Twitter at @ChristianUncut

APAC News: another Australian law firm win for IntApp

Charles Christian — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:21:01 +0000

Russell Kennedy Pty Ltd, a Melbourne-based law firm, has selected IntApp Integration Builder to deliver the data communication and information management underlying internal business processes including new matter intake and new personnel intake.

“We see automating data management as a critical component of workflow – forms and dashboards can coordinate human input and response, but real-time information movement among business applications is key to true process automation,” said Dinesh Rajalingam, IT Manager, Russell Kennedy Pty Ltd. “After evaluating available options and seeing the tremendous success other firms have had with IntApp Integration Builder, we decided we had to get our hands on it. The product is a natural complement to the Microsoft technologies we’re using for our user-facing forms, and it includes pre-built templates for connecting our Elite practice management, Autonomy iManage document management and Microsoft Active Directory identity management systems.

“We considered another software option for business intake from a vendor claiming to provide seamless, native integration with our firm’s systems. But on closer examination, we discovered that significant custom integrations would still need to be built during project implementation,” added Rajalingam. “Rather than go down a path that would have added significant complexity, time and risk to our project, we opted for the architecturally cleaner, quicker and more cost-effective approach provided by IntApp Integration Builder.”